Private health insurers in Massachusetts are threatening to withhold offers for new plans in the state’s Health insurance “Connector.” That follows a decision by the Massachusetts insurance regulator to deny most of the requests by insurers to raise their insurance premiums. We’ve seen this before, and unless the Massachusetts Governor and regulators are smarter than California’s Governor and Public Utility Commission, this is not going to turn out well.

Clearly, the lesson that Grijalva learned from the health care debate was that he wasn’t willing to carry out his threats, so to stay out of trouble he should just stop issuing threats. Basically, he’s been domesticated, trained to take whatever scraps he can get.

I think what is happening in Massachusetts also validates my belief the a public alternative is critical to making the new regulatory system work. I don’t think the private insurance companies would have taken the bold step of refusing to sell on the exchange if there was a viable public option to grab more and more market share each week the insurance companies continued their temper tantrum.

DOD now says it can’t find its own copy of the video.

The interwebs are buzzing today with the news that GOP Gov. Robert McDonnell of Virginia has declared April “Treason in Defense of Slavery” month. But what’s not getting enough attention is the fact that the group that convinced McDonnell to sign the declaration are a bunch of neo-Confederates.

“See this t-shirt I’m wearing underneath? It says “Drill baby drill!” We flash the Republicans in the cloakroom and laugh like hell.”

Born, who pushed to strictly regulate derivatives under the Clinton Administration, but lost the battle to, among other people, Alan Greenspan, told the former Federal Reserve chair that his agency “failed to prevent housing bubble, failed to prevent the predatory lending scandal, failed to prevent the activities that would bring the financial system to the verge of collapse.”

Whitman’s sampler is only the most egregious of a trend toward self-funding of outrageous sums in elections. Michael Bloomberg, Jon Corzine, and dozens of other uber-rich men and women have stratified our political space, widening the gap between the electable and the unelectable. Very few Senators are not millionaires; very often the first question out of a political operative’s mouth about a new candidate is “can they self-fund?”

United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard slammed Massey Energy and Don Blankenship for their negligence that led to the deaths of 25 miners in West Virginia. Gerard, whose union represents thousands of hard rock miners in the United States and Canada, said that the disaster “absolutely could have been prevented.”

The WaPo clarifies an earlier Reuters report (which was unclear that this pertained to CIA) that Anwar al-Awlaki has been added to the CIA’s kill list, after having been on JSOC’s kill list for some months. Does it strike you as odd that we’re targeting US citizens with no judicial process? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve got two entirely separate sets of list on which Americans can be targeted to be killed? Does it strike you as odd that we’ve now got an apparent turf battle over who gets to kill al-Awlaki?